Stories from the trenches, by a fictional hiring partner at a large law firm in a major city.

Monday, September 20, 2004

One of our summers called today to tell us she won't be coming back to the firm in the fall because she got a clerkship. Clerkships are good. They get them used to doing hours and hours of boring work and sitting alone in an office all day. Plus our clients like it when we tell them we have associates who worked for judges. They think it means judges will like them more. Not that we ever get to court. But if clients want to think that, it's fine with me.

I wish I had clerked. Just because if you're going to be doing this for the rest of your life, why not spend a year doing something you'll never get to do again?

Over the weekend, I met a friend of a friend at a dinner party. He's a doctor, and was telling us that the best part about being a doctor is that he gets to hear people's private secrets all day, things that they tell no one else. If that's the best part of being a doctor, it made me glad to be a lawyer. I would not like to be one of his patients. I guess there are bad apples everywhere.

I have a solid trust of my personal doctors (who are all individuals educated back in the U.K.). They're extremely sophisticated, and they carry themselves in a civilized manner, both at work and in their leisure.

However, I've watched a good number of my friends enter medical school, and they're about as mature as men working on a construction site. They joke about diseases, they joke about patients, they hate nurses, and they get high on the most erratic of drugs.

A clerkship is serving as one of the judge's law clerks, who are law school graduates. Your position is what is commonly referred to as an "extern," which are notoriously easy to obtain even with prestigious judged. They are not the same thing.

Part of the problem is the way the different law schools refer to these things. My understanding has always been that working for a judge is 'clerking' while any other job is an internship or externship -- again, it depends on what the school is calling it -- but my school calls all summer jobs, etc ... "clerkships."